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November 13, 2009

One of the goals of the organizers of the International Semantic Web Conference this year was to expose government information managers and contractors to the Semantic Web. To some extent this succeeded; there were a number of attendees who came to the conference from government agencies. On the other hand, it failed; many of them were already Semantic Web enthusiasts, so there was some element of preaching to the choir.

I felt that my own major session, a tutorial on building semantic web applications for government data, was very successful in this regard. I was originally disappointed with the registration, but discovered on the day that most people signed up for 'tutorials' in general, then attended whatever they liked. The room made it to SRO before the first coffee break, and many of the people there were from government agencies or contractors, as desired (many were from other places, but I'm not going to complain about that!).

Probably the biggest measure of success for this goal was the exposure in the Government Computer News. Senior Technology Editor Joab Jackson seemed to like my elevator pitch about the Semantic Web (though it only works for veerrryyy slloooww elevators) enough to repeat it in one of his articles about the event. In another article, Joab told me something I didn't know - that the report we generated in the tutorial is actually interesting to government IT managers, and would somewhat labor intensive without linked open government data.

GCN's 13 resources seems like an intentional flaunting of superstition, since one could easily come up with many more. I am flattered that one of my own pages made it to the list; many of the omissions are available there, and include US Gov XML and OEgov.

All in all (thanks to a great extent to Mr. Jackson's efforts), I think we managed to achieve some exposure for semantic web technology for government information managers.

October 21, 2009

Back on August 1, Ralph Hodgson declared Data Independence Day , to celebrate the opening of oegov, a website that collects and organizes ontologies and data sets about government. Along with recent developments in open data in the US government, this creates a an opportunity to mash-up government data in a way that has not been possible before.

We're celebrating next week at ISWC with a tutorial on building semantic web applications for government. The tutorial will show attendees how to use semantic web standards to create their own data mashup applications. A lot of the features of the semantic web come in to play - distributed vocabularies (using SKOS, of course), linked open data, RSS, etc. The idea is that each attendee will walk away from the workshop with their own app that they created from data now available from the goverment.

Controlled vocabularies play a big role in this - bigger than you might have thought possible. After all, if two people use a common controlled vocabulary well, they can share data. But if they use it badly, well, then data quality issues dominate. Fortunately, there are some controlled vocabularies being used in the government in a pretty consistent way. They are published in convenient forms on OEGov, where they can be used as terminology hubs for mashing up information.

The workshop is part of the International Semantic Web Conference 2009, to be held near Washington, DC from 25-29 October (the workshop itself will be held on Oct 26 in the afternoon, and you can register without attending the whole conference!). The conference this year has a special focus on government data and applications, and should be a great event for anyone interested in openness of government data.